During the early 19^th century the way debates and other goings-on in Parliament were reported and broadcast to the public underwent fundamental change. It was during this period that Hansard, the famous record of parliamentary speeches and proceedings, first became established, while daily accounts of discussions in both Houses began to occupy a prominent place in many leading newspapers.

Amazingly, this coverage of parliamentary debates not only occurred in contravention of the ‘official’ orders of the Commons, banning strangers and reporting, but also operated as a commercial venture. Aided by the huge public interest in issues such as the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, what went on in Parliament became big business. By the early 1830s an estimated 2 million people were reading parliamentary reports in the press, while Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, launched in 1803 and taken over by Thomas Curson Hansard in 1812, sold sufficient copies to turn a reasonable profit, at least until the 1850s.

Not every attempt to cash in on the public interest in Parliament succeeded. Hansard reckoned that by 1829 he had already seen off ‘the greater part’ of 18 rival publications, ‘some promising to give a more condensed and some a more elongated account of the proceedings in Parliament’. The ill-fated Parliamentary Review, for example, rearranged all the debates by topic, providing background information and ‘critical essays’ analysing all the ‘measures discussed’ and arguments ‘on both sides of the question’. The extra work this involved, however, made it too expensive and out of date by the time it appeared.

Hansard’s approach, on the other hand, kept costs to a minimum. Rather than paying for his own reporters, Hansard concocted his account of the debates from the daily newspapers and with notes he sometimes received from MPs. His compilations, for that was what they really were, appeared in regular instalments which could later be bound together, rather than at the end of each session. His heavy reliance on the accuracy and selection criteria of the press reporters, however, was far from ideal. Debates on local or minor matters were often omitted, leading many MPs to complain, not least because of their growing need to satisfy constituency opinion. Worse still, speeches delivered late at night, after the reporters had left to file their copy, failed to get covered. Working conditions in the reporters’ gallery, as Kathryn Rix has shown, were also far from ideal and underwent major change.

Sensing a gap in the market, in 1828 Charles Dickens’ uncle, John Henry Barrow (1796-1858), a former lawyer turned journalist, launched the Mirror of Parliament. Unlike Hansard, Barrow not only employed his own dedicated team of reporters, but also paid them a ‘most liberal remuneration’ for each ‘turn’ in the press gallery. The debates that were later covered by his talented teenage nephew Charles Dickens, in particular, were singled out for praise by leading politicians, including Lord Stanley.

By 1831, at the height of the reform crisis, the Mirror had become ‘the highest extant authority’ of proceedings in Parliament. It wasn’t just that Barrow’s accounts of debates were much longer and closer to the original in terms of language and sentiment. Barrow also managed to cover far more speeches and include a broader range of MPs. The radical Henry Hunt’s brief Commons career is a case in point. Where Hansard printed 660 of his ‘speeches’, the Mirror recorded over 1,000.

By now, however, the Mirror was also in financial trouble. The main investor Henry Winchester MP pulled out after haemorrhaging ‘a considerable portion’ of £7,000 and although Frederick Gye, the famous owner of the pleasure grounds at Vauxhall Gardens, stepped in, within a few years he had also ‘lost a good deal of money’.

In 1834 the Mirror appealed to Parliament for financial assistance. The editor of The Times, however, was unimpressed. ‘That an individual who had embarked in the business of reporting for his own profit should throw the losses caused by his own unsuccessful management … upon the country… to the detriment of all other journalists [was] barefaced … impudence’, he declared.

The Commons agreed. A motion to support publication of an ‘authentic report of the debates arising in the House’ was defeated by 117 votes to 99. Although the Mirror managed to soldier on, reducing its reporters’ salaries and switching to a cheaper folio size, the writing was clearly on the wall. In 1841 it ceased operation.

Ironically, around the time that the Mirror of Parliament folded, the newspaper reports upon which Hansard relied so heavily for its commercial survival started to be replaced by a new form of coverage. By the late 1840s satirical and descriptive ‘sketches’ of parliamentary proceedings had begun to emerge as a staple of the rapidly expanding Victorian popular press.

This created an obvious problem for Hansard. With many newspapers eventually adopting some version of the ‘parliamentary sketch’, the number and range of press reports that Hansard was able to use to compile debates shrank. In 1862 the Morning Chronicle, which had continued to produce extensive daily coverage of debates, was forced to cease publication, leaving its arch-rival The Times as the pre-eminent source.

In this changing public atmosphere, and with its subscriptions falling, it was now Hansard that turned to Parliament for support. In 1855 the government agreed to purchase 100 copies for the various departments of state, providing a guaranteed annual income. In the late 1870s ministers agreed to subsidise coverage of the debates that the press usually ignored, and for the first time Hansard started to use its own reporters, rather than relying solely on newspaper reports.

Even this was not enough, however, and in 1888 Thomas Hansard junior (1813-91), who had been running the business since 1833,  retired and sold the entire operation to a new company, which reckoned it could produce an ‘authorised report’ without subsidy.

Over the next twenty years this venture and six successor operations, including one run by Reuters, all tried to succeed where Hansard had failed, and make a commercial success out of producing parliamentary debates. None of them succeeded. One even went bankrupt. In 1909 Parliament finally assumed responsibility for recording debates itself, employing its own staff of reporters and creating the department that continues to operate today.

P.S.

Details of the various historic Hansards available online can be found here. A BBC documentary about Charles Dickens and parliamentary reporting can be viewed here.

Further Reading:

J. Vice & S. Farrell, The History of Hansard (2017) VIEW

K. Rix, ‘ “Whatever passed in Parliament ought to be communicated to the public”: reporting the proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833-1850’, Parliamentary History (2014), xxxiii. 453-74

http://www.carolineshenton.co.uk/dickens-and-parliament/

E. Peplow, The Story of Parliament: Parliament and the press

P. Salmon, ‘The House of Commons, 1801-1911’, in A Short History of Parliament, ed. C. Jones (2009), 248-69 VIEW

A. Sparrow, Obscure Scribblers. A History of Parliamentary Journalism (2003)

M. H. Port, ‘The Official Record’, Parliamentary History (1990), ix. 175-83.

E. Brown, ‘John Henry Barrow and the Mirror of Parliament‘, Parliamentary Affairs (1956), lx. 311-23

H. Jordan, ‘The Reports of Parliamentary Debates, 1803-1908’, Economica (1931), xxxiv. 437-49

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 17 November 2017, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

2025 also saw the 1832-68 Commons project take on a new PhD student, in a similar collaborative PhD partnership to those we have previously run with the University of Warwick (Dr Seth Thevoz) and the Institute of Historical Research (Dr Martin Spychal). The successful candidate was Megan Hall. She is now working at the University of Sheffield on a fascinating study exploring the experiences of 19^th century Irish MPs.

Many of our Victorian Commons posts in 2025 explored themes beyond the remit of the MP biographies and constituency histories we write for the 1832-68 project. Kathryn Rix continued her research into the reporting of parliamentary debates, showing how growing demands for accurate reporting led to major changes in the reporters’ gallery, as famously used by a young Charles Dickens. She also described the often-misunderstood role of Hansard and modifications to both the temporary House of Commons and Charles Barry’s new Victorian Palace. At one point in the 1850s a brand-new roof even had to be rebuilt to improve acoustics.

Martin Spychal, meanwhile, extended his work on the first Black MP to represent a Scottish constituency. He investigated Peter McLagan’s complex heritage and extraordinary wealth as the son of a Demerara slave owner and an enslaved woman. This new series of articles was complemented by a one-day workshop held jointly with Joe Cozens at The National Archives, involving scholars of slavery and colonialism. More posts in this series will follow.

Alongside this political ‘first’, Naomi Lloyd-Jones offered a memorable ‘last’ with her account of the last known political duel involving MPs. One of the combatants was the noted ‘pistoleer’ George Smythe MP (1818-1857), later 7th Viscount Strangford and 2nd Baron Penshurst, who was also notorious for getting a daughter of the earl of Orford pregnant but refusing to marry her. His adversary was his fellow MP for Canterbury Frederick Romilly, with whom he had fallen out over election arrangements. Their exchange of shots in a wood in 1852 captured the attention of the national press and was widely ridiculed, helping both MPs get defeated at the next election.

Electoral corruption is a standard feature in all our research on 19^th century politics. Anyone thinking there was little left to say, however, should read Naomi’s post about the murky world of behind-the-scenes dealing in election petitions. This was especially revealing about the understudied practice of party agents ‘pairing off’ or ‘swapping’ challenges against recently elected MPs accused of bribery or malpractice. This ‘secret’ dealing in corruption allegations between the parties seems to have become rife before the reform of the whole election petition system in 1868. The changing nature of corruption also featured strongly in Kathryn Rix’s post comparing the practices and culture of the 1835 and 1865 general elections – an important reminder that adjustments to the UK’s electoral system were ongoing and not just confined to landmark Reform Acts.

Changes to the electorate between the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts formed the basis of another article by Martin Spychal, drawing on research undertaken for his recent book. Taking into account the anomalies caused by plural voters, multiple qualifications and inconsistencies in the way ‘returns’ were compiled, this post showed how the large variations in the levels of adult male enfranchisement across the UK’s constituencies narrowed significantly from 1832 to the 1860s. Again this showed that the first reformed electoral system was far from ‘fixed’.

Another type of change was explored in Philip Salmon’s post examining the work of the chairman of ways and means. It was during the 19^th century that this key position in the Commons evolved into its recognisably modern form. The character and impartiality of the men appointed altered significantly. Early 19^th century officeholders – among them a crop of slave owners and fraudsters – were gradually replaced by a series of increasingly high calibre administrators. In 1853 the chairman also began to act as deputy speaker, a move reflected in the growing tendency for retirees to receive a peerage or even be promoted to the Speakership itself. One highlight here was the inclusion of a rare Victorian audio recording of Henry Cecil Raikes MP, the chair of ways and means from 1874-80.

Any idea that the changes outlined in all these posts increased the status or power of the Commons, however, was countered by an article by Philip examining the role and significance of the 19^th century House of Lords, based on a talk given in the River Room, House of Lords. As well as challenging the view that the Lords became subservient to the Commons in the 19^th century, this examined various attempts by Liberals, Radicals and even some Conservatives to reform the Lords. It also charted its perception as a legitimate alternative to the Commons in representing ‘popular opinion’ and the ‘will of the nation’ on key issues.

House of Lords reform, of course, is likely to be a topic that many commentators will be turning their attention to – historical and otherwise – during the new year. We will be continuing our research into 19th century parliamentary politics, MPs and elections, and look forward to sharing more highlights in 2026.

For a 20 minute talk about the Reform Act by Dr Philip Salmon please click here.

Much attention used to be focused on the number of voters enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act. The extent to which the overall increase of around 314,000 electors in the UK (from around 11 to 18% of adult males) amounted to some form of democratic advance, however, has always been complicated by the Act’s limitations as an enfranchising measure, especially given the huge expectations aroused by the popular outdoors campaign in its support. Not only were most working-class voters excluded from the Act’s new occupier franchises, helping to inspire the important Chartist movement, but also many working-class electors were actually deprived of their former voting rights.

In Maldon, for example, the number of electors dropped from over 3,000 in 1831 to just 716 in 1832. This was owing to the Act’s new restrictions on non-resident voters, honorary freemen and freemen created by marriage. Abolishing the votes obtained by marrying a freeman’s daughter was an aspect of the Reform Act which evidently caused all sorts of problems in some boroughs. Similar reductions occurred in Lancaster (72%), Ludlow (64%), Bridgnorth (50%) and Sudbury (49%), as the History of Parliament‘s detailed constituency articles reveal.

Add to this all the bureaucracy involved in the new yearly voter registration system – form filling, paying up arrears of rates, one shilling registration fees – and it is easy to see why so many people failed to benefit as expected from 1832. ‘Many doggedly refused to register’, noted one paper. ‘To the poor man’, complained another, ‘a shilling is a serious amount’. Taken as a whole, for every three new borough electors enfranchised by the 1832 Reform Act, at least one pre-1832 voter was deprived of their voting rights. Another restriction with lasting cultural connotations was the Act’s formal limitation of the franchise, for the first time, exclusively to ‘male persons‘.

County voters faced fewer new restrictions, both in terms of continuing to exercise their old franchise (the 40 shilling freehold) even if they were non-resident, or claiming one of the new occupier (tenant, copyholder and leaseholder) franchises. But this did not make the impact of 1832 any more democratic.

One of the most strikingly resilient interpretations of county politics, put forward by the American sociologist D. C. Moore, has been the idea of ‘deference voting’. Vast numbers of newly enfranchised tenant farmers, Moore argued, overwhelmingly polled the same way as their landlords – willingly or otherwise – as part of ‘deference communities’, effectively bolstering the power of the aristocratic landed elite in Britain’s political system and the influence of traditional landed interests (see cartoon below). The tensions between agriculture and industry that underpinned so many 19th century political developments at Westminster, including of course the famous repeal of the corn laws in 1846, have often been linked back to this reconfiguration of British politics in 1832.

Another boost to the ‘county interest’, which is sometimes overlooked, resulted from the Reform Act’s redistribution clauses. As well abolishing the infamous ‘rotten’ boroughs and allocating new MPs to unrepresented towns and cities, almost the same number of extra MPs were given to the English counties. This was done by turning 26 existing county constituencies into 52 double member seats and allocating a third MP to seven counties. The impact on the House of Commons of increasing the number of English county MPs in this way, from 82 in 1831 to 144 in 1832, was arguably just as profound as the Act’s allocation of 63 new MPs to rapidly industrialising English towns, where most attention has traditionally been focussed.

New research by Dr Martin Spychal, published in his book Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act, helps to show just how important this reconfiguration of ‘interests’ and the complex boundary changes of the 1832 Reform Act were in reshaping Britain’s political landscape after 1832. Other pioneering research, carried out by Dr James Smith, has explored the Act’s broader impact on the evolving relationship between the four different nations of the UK and on Parliament’s use of UK-wide legislation in the early Victorian era.

In our own ongoing research on MPs and constituency politics for the 1832-68 project, it has been the cultural impact of reform that has really stood out. The way MPs behaved and the way their constituents expected them to behave clearly shifted as a result of reform, with many MPs – particularly those elected as radicals – becoming far more active and accountable and publicising their activities in the press and through constituency meetings as never before. The growing ‘rage for speaking’ in debate, the introduction of a new press gallery, new public access (including a ladies’ gallery), new voting lobbies and the formal publishing of votes of MPs were just some of the ways in which parliamentary politics began to become more open and ‘representative’ after 1832, just as many anti-reformers had feared. All this, however, was complicated by the parallel survival of many older traditions, especially in the pre-reform constituencies. Here almost tribal patterns of non-party voting, the cult of ‘independent’ MPs, the survival of many ‘pocket’ boroughs and above all the widespread use of bribery, drink and corruption at election time all helped to limit the pace of change after 1832.

Ultimately it would take many other reforms to Britain’s representative system, including the abolition of public voting in 1872 with the introduction of the secret ballot to really bring about more fundamental change.

Further Reading:

‘The English reform legislation, 1831-32’, in The House of Commons, 1820-32, ed. D. Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2009), i. 374-412  VIEW

‘Nineteenth-century electoral reform’, Modern History Review, xviii (2015), 8-12 VIEW

‘Electoral reform and the political modernization of England’, Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, xxiii (2003), 49-67  VIEW

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 7 June 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

The House of Lords remains a rather neglected subject in modern British political history. One recent study has even suggested that ‘for the last half-century and more it has been largely ignored’ (but note the reading list below). Most studies constructed around the traditional theme of democratic development inevitably tend to downplay the significance of the ‘unelected’ chamber. The Lords, however, should not be under-estimated.

Over half the twenty prime ministers of the 19th century, including the two longest serving (Liverpool and Salisbury), formed their governments as peers, while two more (Russell and Disraeli) started out in the Commons but later served as premier in the upper house. For just over half the entire nineteenth century, the government was led by a prime minister sitting in the Lords. At ministerial level the presence of peers was more striking still, even well into the 20th century. Attlee’s first Cabinet of 1945 and Macmillan’s in 1957 contained five members of the Lords, while Churchill’s of 1951 had seven.

Rather than being separate or even rival institutions, as is sometimes assumed, the Victorian Commons and Lords were in fact deeply integrated in terms of their practical business, politics and personnel. Family ties and patronage networks ensured a close working relationship between members of both Houses, with many MPs either succeeding or being promoted to peerages. Many peers also continued to exercise a considerable degree of influence over elections to the Commons. Where conflicts between the two Houses did occur, as for example over the famous 1832 reform bill, they were primarily shaped by the political composition of the Lords rather than any deep-seated institutional jealousies.

The Lords always remained an overwhelmingly Tory chamber. Even by 1880, despite years of Liberal peerage creations aimed at trying to rectify a long-standing imbalance, the number of Liberal Lords had only just passed the 200 mark, or roughly 40%, of the total. This was then decimated by the Liberal party splitting apart over Irish home rule.

One effect of this was that many Whig and Liberal measures that passed the Commons were often defeated or altered out of all recognition by the Lords, sometimes even against the express wishes of the Tory leaders. The Whigs’ original 1835 municipal reform bill, for instance, was completely mangled by the Lords in defiance of the Conservative leader Sir Robert Peel’s instructions.

The fact that so many controversial reforms of the 19th century ended up being proposed by Tory or Conservative governments, however, also meant that the number of conflicts between the two Houses was far lower than it otherwise might have been. Hugely contentious issues such as Catholic emancipation (1829), the Maynooth grant (1845), the repeal of the corn laws (1846) and the 1867 Reform Act, all of which would surely have been defeated in the Lords if sent there by a Liberal ministry, were allowed to pass by a Tory-dominated Lords, albeit with varying degrees of dissent.

Steady resistance in the Lords to measures such as the abolition of church rates, the removal of religious tests in universities, and allowing Jews to enter Parliament, put them at odds with the Commons on a regular basis throughout the 1850s and 1860s, but again it was at the behest of leaders, notably Disraeli, that they eventually gave way. In 1868 the Lords threw out Gladstone’s preliminary measures for disestablishing the Anglican church in Ireland. Following that year’s general election, however, which gave the Liberals a substantial majority, the Tory Lords reluctantly consented to pass a compromise measure at the behest of their leader Lord Cairns.

One area where institutional conflicts did occasionally occur, however, was over finance. This was supposed to be the exclusive preserve of the lower House. A problem here, however, was what exactly this financial embargo covered. In 1860, in an important showdown between the chambers, the Lords rejected the Liberal ministry’s proposals to abolish the duties on paper. This formed part of the government’s broad move towards obtaining more revenue from income and property, but was seen by many peers as touching on wider national issues as well. Rather than confront the Lords head on, the ministry passed resolutions in the Commons reasserting its exclusive right to deal with all money matters, and in the following session controversially inserted the proposals into their budget. Despite many objections this was duly passed.

The 1911 Parliament Act, and beyond

This increasing practice of ‘packing’ budgets with other measures lay at the heart of the constitutional crisis of 1909-11. After three years of throwing out a series of Liberal reforms, including an unpopular licensing bill, and earning themselves their reputation as ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’, the Lords went one step further and rejected the so-called ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. As well as extending inheritance duties on landed estates, this had also tacked on previously rejected licensing and land valuation reforms.

The Liberal ministry called an election, held in January 1910, but their resulting losses made them heavily dependent on the support of the Irish nationalist MPs and Labour, both of whom shared the Liberal party’s growing commitment to a formal reduction of the Lords’ powers. After months of high political drama and abortive negotiations between the two Houses, and yet another general election in December 1910 that solved nothing, the Parliament Act of 1911 was eventually passed under the threat of mass peerage creations by the king.

Much has been made of the way the 1911 Parliament Act formally ended the Lords’ ability to interfere in money matters (as defined by the Speaker) and its replacement of the Lords’ complete veto over legislation with a delaying power of two years. In reality, however, this was precisely the way in which the Lords had operated for most of the 19th century, rarely intruding into budgetary matters and often postponing rather than preventing the passage of controversial measures (with the obvious exception of Irish home rule).

Not only were the Parliament Act’s provisions limited to bills that originated in the Commons – leaving completely untouched the peers’ powers over bills introduced in the Lords and all secondary or delegated legislation – but also the opportunity for bills to be delayed until after the next election in effect conferred a ‘referendum’ power on the upper house, legitimising its claims to a separate constitutional relationship with the electorate.

Perhaps most significantly, the Parliament Act’s technical requirements – bills delayed by the Lords had to go back through the Commons in the same form three times before becoming law – in practice made it far too cumbersome to be used on a regular basis. Tellingly, during the 20^th century it was implemented just six times. In 1914 Welsh church disestablishment and Irish home rule were enacted under its provisions, only for their implementation to be suspended for the duration of the First World War (and in the latter case aborted owing to Irish independence). The 1949 Parliament Act, which further reduced the Lords’ delaying powers to one year, also reached the statute book without the Lords’ consent, as did the 1991 War Crimes Act, the 1999 European Elections Act and the 2000 Sexual Offences Act.

All other legislation that was passed during the 20th century, however, continued to be debated, scrutinised and where necessary amended by the Lords before becoming law, much as it had been during the Victorian era. The only difference was that after the primacy of the Commons had been asserted during the showdown of 1909-11, the Lords became less disposed to be combative in its approach and more inclined to engage in political manoeuvrings behind the scenes. To this extent, it could be argued that the change implemented in the early twentieth century was as much a cultural as a constitutional one.

Further Reading:

• P. Salmon, ‘Parliament’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000, ed. D. S. Brown, R. Crowcroft and G. Pentland (Oxford University Press, 2018), 83-102 VIEW
• C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911-2011: A Century of Non-Reform (2012)
• R. Davis, A Political History of the House of Lords 1811-46 (2008)
• R. Davis, Leaders in the Lords 1765-1902 (2003)
• C. Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and Ideological Politics (1995)
• A. Adonis, Making Aristocracy Work. The Peerage and the Political System in Britain 1884-1914 (1993)
• E. A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society 1815-1911 (1992)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 13 November 2018, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

The 19^th century is traditionally seen as a key period of ‘democratisation’ in British politics. The reform acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 vastly expanded the number of people who could vote in elections (with the glaring exception of women) and created a constituency system based on similarly sized electoral districts. By the end of the century, a recognisably modern and almost democratic voting system had emerged, underpinning the legitimacy and authority of the elected House of Commons. But where did all this leave the ‘other place’, the unelected and hereditary House of Lords?

The traditional assumption has been that as the electoral system ‘democratised’, so too the Commons became the superior body in Parliament. The constitutional stand-off between the two Houses over the reform bill in 1831-2 is widely seen as a pivotal moment in this process. Under the threat of new pro-reform peers being created, the Lords were eventually forced to surrender to the Commons and agree to pass the 1832 Reform Act. And with a new electoral system in place after 1832, which limited the former ability of many members of the Lords to control elections, the Commons now had an even greater claim to be dominant and implement its policies without opposition.

The leader of the Tory anti-reformers in the Lords, the Duke of Wellington, had little doubt about the significance of the Reform Act, famously declaring that it would ‘destroy the House of Lords’. The constitutional theorist Walter Bagehot, writing 30 years later, agreed, arguing that the Reform Act had fundamentally altered the ‘function’ of the Lords, effectively making it a temporary ‘revising’ or ‘suspending’ chamber. Writing in 1908 the legal expert Lawrence Lowell noted how the ‘Great’ Reform Act had drawn ‘attention to the fact that an hereditary body, however great the personal influence of its members, could never … be the equal … of a representative chamber’. Chris Ballinger in his recent magisterial work on the 20^th century Lords has also suggested that ‘the power of the Lords diminished throughout the nineteenth century’.

One problem with this narrative though is that it does not capture the whole story. One of the most striking features to emerge from our ongoing research on the post-1832 House of Commons is the continuing role of the Lords in actively shaping and even deciding many aspects of the political agenda. Some of this occurred behind the scenes, but there was also a significant amount in terms of policy and procedural initiatives that have been overlooked.

An assertive Lords

Only a few months after the first reformed election of 1832 returned a huge majority for the Whig-Liberals, for instance, the Lords successfully managed to block the Whig ministry’s controversial Irish Church ‘appropriation’ reforms, in what the Ultra-Tory Lord Ellenborough gleefully termed a ‘triumph’. Emboldened, they then went on to modify the terms of the bill to abolish slavery in favour of slaveowners, before proceeding to throw out major reforms granting the admission of Dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and allowing Jews to sit in Parliament. The Lords would continue to reject bills for Jewish emancipation – reforms that had passed the elected Commons – on another eight occasions before 1858.

The Lords became even more assertive after the 1835 election reduced the Whig government’s majority, rejecting or amending an all-time record number of Commons bills over the next two Parliaments. One of the most significant of these was the Whig ministry’s 1835 municipal corporations bill, replacing the old corporations that had governed English towns with newly elected town councils. Drawn up by the radical election agent Joseph Parkes, the bill that originally passed the Commons proposed abolishing all the freemen voters who had been admitted by the old corporations, despite their ‘ancient right’ privileges having been preserved under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act.

Latching on to this controversial clause, the Lords drastically amended the bill out of all recognition, arguing that disfranchising these freemen voters was not only grossly unfair, but a modification of the settlement of 1832 by stealth, which went way beyond the remit of a local council bill. Appalled by the attack on their ancient rights, freemen voters across the nation rallied behind the Lords’ amendments, in what became a popular and successful campaign. Sensing this was not the best issue on which to make a stand, the Whig leadership in the Commons reluctantly accepted most of the Lords’ changes, including the preservation of freemen voters. As Joseph Parkes later admitted, ‘we committed a great mistake in the bill. It was absurdly foolish … to attack the freemen … Nor was it exactly fair to attempt it through the municipal bill. We were clearly … causing unpopularity among a large class of the people’.

On this issue, as on many others that followed, the Lords had clearly managed to gauge and represent public opinion in a way that challenged the authority of the Commons. The results of the next general election seemed to vindicate their actions. In 1837 the Whig government’s majority was almost completely wiped out, with most freemen voters supporting anti-Whig candidates.

This notion of the House of Lords being able to articulate the ‘will of the people’ more accurately than the Commons is most famously associated with the extraordinary theories developed later in the 19^th century by the 3^rd Marquess of Salisbury. The leader of the Conservatives in the Lords from 1881-1902, and three times Conservative prime minister, Salisbury did more than anyone else to fashion a ‘doctrine’ of the Lords being a genuinely representative assembly, untainted by party diktats and the ‘demagoguery’ of election cycles. As Salisbury put it in June 1869:

We must try to impress upon the country the fact that, [just] because we are not an elective House, we are not a bit less a representative House … It may be that the House of Commons in determining the opinion of the nation is wrong; and … does not represent the full … convictions of the nation.

After 1885 Salisbury and other Tory peers even began to suggest that owing to the representative deficiencies of the new first-past-the-post system – a system which ironically Salisbury himself had helped to implement in 1885 – the Lords could be a better interpreter of public feeling than the Commons, with its ‘crude’ non-proportional election system based on simple ‘bare majorities’.

The most striking example of Salisbury’s ‘doctrine’ in action was the Lords’ rejection of Gladstone’s second Irish Home Rule bill by 419 votes to 41 in 1893, incidentally the largest Lords vote of the century. Salisbury insisted that Irish Home Rule had not been sufficiently mandated at the previous general election and needed clearer national support, as part of what became known as his ‘referendal theory’. In 1894 the Lords threw out other Commons bills on similar grounds, dealing with employers’ liabilities and arbitration for evicted Irish tenants. The result of the 1895 general election then rewarded Salisbury and the Conservative-Unionists with a substantial majority, seemingly vindicating Salisbury’s claims about the Lords being more representative than the Commons and the ‘conscience of the nation’.

Opposition to the Lords

Not everyone accepted the idea that the Lords enjoyed this representative function. The Lords’ steady rejection of bills approved by the Commons – whether it was the civil and religious reforms of the 1830s, financial measures such as the repeal of paper duties in the 1860s, military reforms in the 1870s, electoral reforms in the 1880s, and almost every bill relating to Ireland – triggered regular calls for reform of the Lords in the popular press, on the hustings and eventually in the Commons itself.

Earlier demands for change in the mid-1830s by radicals such as George Grote and John Roebuck and the Irish agitator Daniel O’Connell included plans to replace all hereditary peers with elected delegates, and to deprive the Lords of their ability to completely reject bills. Removing the bishops also became a standard demand. These under-studied proposals, many of which resemble today’s arguments, provided a field-day for satirists but rarely made it to the floor of the Commons, let alone a vote.

By the 1850s, however, a number of leading Whigs and Liberals had also begun to contemplate changes to the Upper House. Faced with likely opposition in the Lords on major policies such the repeal of navigation laws, for example, the prime minister Lord John Russell repeatedly considered introducing life peerages for distinguished men from outside the Commons, only to be dissuaded by his Cabinet warning that this could lead to the ‘packing’ of the Lords by the government of the day, again a familiar modern argument. In the end Russell, like other party leaders, was forced to fall back on the use of ‘proxy votes’ – voting rights transferred by absent peers to other Lords – to get his government’s agenda through. The abolition of these proxies in 1868 by a standing order undoubtedly made it more difficult for some later governments to manage the Lords, increasing the calls for reform.

In 1856 a solitary ‘trial’ life peerage was eventually created with the approval of the Queen, to bolster the legal expertise available to Palmerston’s government. Sir James Parke, a noted jurist, was ennobled as Baron Wensleydale. When it came to it, however, the Lords refused to let him take his seat, arguing that his life peerage would dilute the hereditary honour of the House and establish a dangerous precedent. Wensleydale was quickly upgraded to a hereditary peerage. It would not be until 1876 that two senior judges were admitted to the Lords on a temporary basis, and not until 1887 that these new ‘law lords’ were then made into peers for life.

More substantive proposals for Lords reform eventually emerged in the last two decades of the 19^th century, against the backdrop of Salisbury’s increasingly bold assertions about the Lords’ representative mandate. In 1884, 1886 and 1888 the radical MP Henry Labouchere introduced motions to abolish the Lords, each time increasing his Commons support. In 1894 he won a vote in the Commons calling for the removal of the Lords’ ability to reject bills. No legislation was prepared, however, before the 1895 election brought Salisbury back into power.

Meanwhile in the Lords itself the future Liberal leader Lord Rosebery moved for a committee to look at life peerages and restrictions on hereditary peers in 1884. Four years later he proposed bringing in elections for a limited number of hereditary peers, who would serve a fixed term, and life peerages for delegates representing local councils and some overseas colonies. None of these initiatives was successful. The idea of life peerages, and making hereditary peers undertake some form of public service before they qualified to sit, was later taken up by a group of young, dashing aristocratic MPs in the Commons, famously led by the Liberal Unionist William Palmer and the Conservative George Curzon (later viceroy of India and leader of the House of Lords). As their campaign showed, by the 1890s even some Conservative-Unionists were also beginning to advocate change, not to restrict the Lords’ powers – the policy increasingly favoured by most Liberals and the National Liberal Federation – but instead to enhance the Lords’ legitimacy and authority.

Why wasn’t the Lords reformed during the 19^th century?

This takes us back to the question of why the Lords, unlike the Commons, avoided being constitutionally reformed during the 19^th century? The traditional argument that the Lords adopted a more submissive role following the 1832 Reform Act, accepting the superior status of the Commons, is clearly not the answer. Both in terms of the number of bills the Lords blocked or amended after 1832, and in terms of developing its own distinct claim to reflect the will of the nation, it remained a highly assertive and influential body. The number of public petitions that continued to be sent to the Lords provides yet another indicator of its importance as a national forum for drawing parliamentary attention to all sorts of political causes, and as a useful arbiter of local grievances.

Linked to this, the Lords also performed a crucial but much overlooked role in managing private legislation. The latest edition of How Parliament Works notes that the ‘vast majority’ of laws passed by Parliament ‘and by far the more important, are public’. Throughout the 19^th century, however, exactly the opposite was true. Not only did ‘private’ acts of Parliament (not to be confused with private members’ bills) completely transform the physical environment and create Britain’s modern infrastructure – legalising the construction of railways, canals, tramways, docks, sewers, roads, bridges, museums, parks, and essential utilities such as water, gas and electricity (to name but a few) – but they also outnumbered ‘public’ acts by a factor of more than two to one well into the 20th century. The sheer volume of private bill work undertaken by the Lords, particularly from the 1840s, eventually forced them to develop new, streamlined legislative procedures, many of which went on to be copied or adapted by the Commons and transferred to the handling of public business as well.

The fact that so many prime ministers sat in the Lords rather than in the Commons also helped to bolster its status and legitimacy. Over half the twenty prime ministers of the 19th century, including the two longest serving (Liverpool and Salisbury), formed their governments as peers, while two more (Russell and Disraeli) started out in the Commons but later served as premier in the upper house. For just over half the entire nineteenth century, the government was led by a prime minister sitting in the Lords. 

Underpinning this, rather than being separate or even rival institutions, as is sometimes assumed, the Victorian Commons and Lords were deeply integrated in terms of their practical business, politics and personnel. Family ties and patronage networks ensured a very close working relationship between members of both Houses, with many MPs either succeeding or being promoted to peerages. Behind the scenes, both the membership of the Lords and the Commons also began to adapt, reflecting new types of wealth associated with industrialisation and the professions such as banking and commerce. Over 40% of the new peers created after 1882 were from non-landed backgrounds.

Most significant of all, the Lords certainly didn’t oppose every progressive measure sent up from the Commons, instead passing many reforms that are now viewed as key milestones in Britain’s political development. It granted Dissenters equal civil rights in 1828, finally agreed to pass Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed the Catholic college of Maynooth to be state funded in 1845, despite so many Lords (and bishops) being staunchly Protestant Anglicans.

In 1846 the Lords even backed Peel’s highly controversial repeal of the corn laws, despite its membership being overwhelmingly landed and major beneficiaries of agricultural protection. Significantly, the rebellion of the Conservative party on this issue against Peel was actually lower in the Lords than it was in the Commons. In 1867, despite huge misgivings, the Lords also agreed to pass Disraeli’s second Reform Act, the greatest extension of voting rights of the 19^th century, only eclipsed in its scope by the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

The fact that it was Tory / Conservative governments that proposed so many of these major reforms of the 19^th century clearly helped to reduce the number of conflicts between the two Houses during this period. Despite years of Liberal peerage creations, the Lords always remained a Tory chamber, with Liberal membership peaking at 40% in 1880. The dominance of the Tory peers combined with their loyalty to party – ironically the very thing that Salisbury liked to criticise the Commons for – ensured that most Tory bills, even highly controversial ones, nearly always passed the Lords.

This partisan bias of the House of Lords is of course often viewed as the cause of its undoing in the early 20^th century, when its veto over legislation was finally reduced to a delaying power of two years by the 1911 Parliament Act. But for most of the 19^th century this same partisan Tory bias also helped the Lords to survive. For as long as Conservative ministries continued to enact progressive reforms in the national interest, the number of dramatic ‘peers versus people’ moments remained limited, keeping the Lords on the right side of history.

PS

Further reading:

A. Adonis, Making aristocracy work: the peerage and the political system in Britain 1884-1914 (1993)

C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911-2011 (2012)

R. Davis, A political history of the House of Lords 1811-1846 (2008)

R. Davis (ed.), Lords of Parliament. Studies, 1714-1914 (1995)

R. Davis (ed.), Leaders in the Lords 1765-1902 (2003)

R. Davis, ‘Wellington, Peel and the House of Lords in the 1840s’, in C. Jones, P. Salmon & R. Davis (eds.), Partisan politics, principle and reform in Parliament and the constituencies, 1689-1880 (2005), 164-82

R. Davis, ‘House of Lords, 1801-1911’, in C. Jones (ed.), A Short History of Parliament (2009), 193-210

J. Hogan, ‘Party management in the House of Lords, 1846-1865’, Parliamentary History (1991), x. 124-50

D. Large, ‘The decline of the “party of the crown” and the rise of parties in the House of Lords, 1783-1837’, English Historical Review (1963), lxxviii. 669-95

G. Le May, The Victorian Constitution (1979), 127-51

Lord Longford, A history of the House of Lords (1988)

A. Lowell, The government of England (1908), i. 394-422

P. Salmon, ‘Parliament’, in D. Brown et al (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Modern British political history, 1800-2000 (2018), 83-102

E. A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society 1815-1911 (1992)

R. Smith (ed.), The House of Lords: a thousand years of British tradition (1994)

A. Turberville, ‘The House of Lords and the Advent of Democracy, 1837-67’, History (1944), xxix. 152-83

C. Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and ideological politics. Lord Salisbury’s referendal theory and the Conservative party, 1846-1922 (1995)

C. Comstock Weston, ‘Salisbury and the Lords, 1868-1895’, Historical Journal (1982), xxv. 103-29

One of the themes being explored by the Victorian Commons project is the decline of ‘independence’ in the 19th-century Commons and the rise of party-based voting by MPs – a development neatly captured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s famous lampoon of 1882 about MPs being forced to ‘leave their brains outside’ and ‘vote just as their leaders tell ‘em to’ (Iolanthe).

MPs continued to assert their independence on a number of major issues throughout the 1832-68 period, as the rebellion of the Tories against Peel on free trade in 1846 or the split in the Liberals over parliamentary reform in 1866 amply demonstrate. Few, however, chose to defy the party leadership quite so publicly or defiantly as Swynfen Jervis, the ‘eccentric’ Liberal MP for Bridport from 1837-41, and the subject of a recent biography by Simon Swynfen Jervis (see further reading below).

Jervis stands out for all sorts of reasons, not least because of his zealous support for free trade at a time when most landowners continued to defend the corn laws. Unlike many inheritors of large country estates, Jervis was convinced that removing the import duties on foreign corn would benefit agriculture and that free trade itself was the ‘birth-right of every Englishman’. Jervis even promised to compensate all his tenant farmers on his Darlaston Hall estates should they suffer. ‘If any reduction takes place in the price of grain without a proportionate rise in the demand for other agricultural produce’, he announced, ‘I am ready to meet such a change … by a corresponding reduction of rent’.

It was the striking manner in which Jervis rebelled against the Whig-Liberal government on a crucial Irish vote in 1839, however, which brought him to national attention. Rather than simply staying away or quietly voting against the government, Jervis took the highly unusual step of sending the private communication he had received from the government Whip, Edward Stanley, to the newspapers. He then added a full explanation of his reasons for refusing to obey. ‘As an earnest Reformer, I have always voted with ministers’, he declared, ‘but the question which is now about to be raised in the Commons, however it may be glossed and disguised …  had been made a convenient stalking-horse to support their waning popularity’ and ‘appears to me utterly impossible to approve … without indirectly sanctioning their general policy’.

The press had a field-day, especially as official party ‘whipping’ was still in its infancy and remained cloaked in controversy. ‘The letter of Swynfen Jervis, an old and staunch Reformer, repelling the official application of the secretary of the treasury for his vote … has excited the universal displeasure and animadversions of minsters’, noted one Tory paper. Commentary in the Liberal press included assertions that ‘the member’s heart is with the Tories’ and mockery of him as a ‘strange eccentric being, who professing out and out democracy, “is everything by turns and nothing long”’. Bridport’s electors, however, were more forgiving. ‘I see nothing but is manly, straightforward and honest in the conduct of Mr. Jervis’, wrote one local observer.

Jervis continued to defy the Whig-Liberal government on a range of issues after 1839. He also earned the opprobrium of the Tories by launching a scathing attack on the Church of England in more private correspondence, this time with a local parson, that found its way into the press. Despite remaining popular with the ‘ultra-Radical clique’ at Bridport, Jervis retired as its MP in 1841. Meeting him around this time, the Tory essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t mince his words:

A wretched dud called Swinfen Jervis … called one day … a dirty little atheistic radical, living seemingly in a mere element of pretentious twaddle, with Sheridan Knowleses … and all the literary vapidities of his day.

A subsequent associate of the pre-Raphaelites Dante and Christina Rossetti, who were regular visitors to Darlaston Hall,  Jervis is best remembered today for his poems and his Dictionary of the Language of Shakespeare, which appeared posthumously in 1868.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 13 March 2017, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

Further reading:

Simon Swynfen Jervis, Swynefen Jervis MP 1797-1867. Radical Landowner, Poetaster, Pteridologist and Shakepearian (Staffordshire Record Society, 2020)

T. A. Jenkins, ‘The Whips in the Early-Victorian House of Commons,’ Parliamentary History, 19 (2000), 259-286

J. Sainty and G. Cox, ‘The Identification of Government Whips in the House of Commons 1830-1905’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 339-358

P. M. Gurowich, ‘The Continuation of War by Other Means: Party and Politics, 1855-1865′, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 603-631

H. Berrington, ‘Partisanship and Dissidence in the Nineteenth-Century House of Commons’, Parliamentary Affairs, 21 (1967-8), 338-74

The Ballot Act of 1872 sits alongside the three major Reform Acts of the 19th century (and various Corrupt Practices Acts) in helping to transform British elections into their recognisably modern form. As some of our earlier blogs have shown, it ended a system of open voting and public nominations that had become increasingly associated with bribery, the intimidation of voters and disorderly behaviour, often fuelled by drink.

The calmness and order of Britain’s new secret elections, by contrast, was striking. At the first by-elections to be held in Pontefract, Preston, Tiverton and Richmond, it was widely reported that there was none of the usual ‘horse play’ and ‘excitement’. Some commentators even complained that the secret ballot had ‘taken all the life out of elections’, making them ‘dull’. They have become ‘the most monotonous of monotonies’, commented the South Wales Daily News, wistfully recalling the agitation and passion of ‘olden times’.

These and many similar press reports clearly support the idea of a remarkably smooth transition to secret voting, despite some initial hitches in places like Pontefract, which had just 4 weeks to prepare for the new system. However, a number of longer-term issues did begin to emerge in later polls, which have received less attention. At the municipal level, in particular, problems began to occur in places where multiple councillors were being chosen in each ward. Reports of electors inadvertently crossing the wrong combinations of boxes, because the official ballot papers listed the candidates differently to the leaflets they had received, or of electors being confused about how many crosses they could use, or even writing their names on the ballot as they had done previously in municipal elections, began to fill the local newspapers.

Illiterate voters appear to have had a particularly difficult time. Great fun, in a typically cruel Victorian fashion, was made out of one ‘gaily attired’ female voter at Sheffield’s first council elections held using the secret ballot, who after declaring ‘in the loudest of tones’ that she ‘could not read’, had to be physically restrained by the returning officer from shouting out her votes. She was promptly taken aside and ‘amidst the laughter of those in the room’ made to whisper her choices, before being given a lecture about ‘learning to read’.

The biggest problem, however, which was to become a significant issue in the 1874 general election, was the question of how to cast a good old fashioned ‘plumper’ in those constituencies that continued to elect two (or more) MPs. It is often forgotten that unlike today with our first-past-the-post system, before 1885 the vast bulk of England’s parliamentary seats were multi-member. This created a much more complex voting system in which electors could either divide their support between different candidates or use just one of their multiple votes to support a single candidate, by casting a ‘plumper’. Shortly before the 1874 general election the Reading Mercury, 31 Jan. 1874, published this extraordinary but by no means uncommon advice:

If the voter intends to vote … all he has to do is put a cross (X) against the names of the candidates … Of course if the voter intends to give a “plumper” two crosses must be written opposite the name of the candidate thus favoured.

Reports soon filled the press of voters up and down the country either intending to or actually casting multiple votes for one candidate, all of which, as agents and their candidates frantically tried to point out, invalidated their ballot papers. Many newspapers, especially the London-based journals, blamed this confusion about plumping on the cumulative voting introduced alongside the secret ballot for London’s School Board elections in 1870. Under this system voters could, and often did, cast multiple votes for a single candidate.

The plumping problem, however, was not just confined to London’s constituencies. In Brighton one horrified Conservative candidate reported receiving multiple letters of support from voters saying ‘I shall give my two votes for you’. Fearing the worst, on the eve of the poll he issued a special address, warning that ‘if my voters shall commit that error, hundreds, if not thousands of votes would be lost’. In Sunderland one draper, questioned by a candidate, ‘said he meant to give him his two votes’. Things got so bad in Glasgow that special notices had to be issued telling electors that ‘you cannot give more than one vote to any one candidate or mark more than one X after the name of such candidate’.

Plumping was just one of the traditional forms of voting in multi-member seats that clearly did not translate smoothly on to the modern ballot paper. Unaided by the public conversations with clerks and agents that used to take place before electors orally declared their votes at the poll, many electors also struggled with selecting the appropriate combinations of candidates, especially in the absence of party labels on the ballot papers.

One upshot of all this, with long-term consequences, was the stimulus given to local party organisations in the constituencies to produce better guidance and campaign literature and develop new types of electioneering. Aided by their efforts, a deluge of additional information and advice about how best to support either the local Conservative party or the Liberals soon became available. But where did this leave the non-party voters, the backbone of the old public voting system, whose votes it must be remembered accounted for around one-fifth of all those cast between 1832 and 1868?

The data currently available indicates that non-party voting – either supporting candidates from different parties (in what amounted to a cross-party vote) or casting a non-partisan plump (voting for only one candidate from a particular party even when others were standing) – declined significantly in the 1874 and 1880 elections, for the first time dropping below 8%. The move to secrecy, it seems, made the whole business of casting non-party votes in multiple member constituencies more complex and liable to confusion, requiring a greater political awareness and level of knowledge on the part of the voter.

It would not be long of course before this whole system of multiple votes and being able to make non-party choices would be almost completely eradicated, making the use of the new secret ballot papers much more straightforward. After just one more general election in 1880, and yet another dramatic expansion of the franchise in 1884, most of the UK shifted to winner-takes-all single member seats in 1885 – a system that for better or worse, continues to define our modern party politics today.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 22 November 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

Public or ‘open’ voting is often associated with the most glaring iniquities of Victorian elections, including the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol, violence and the harassment of electors at the poll, as well as bribery and the intimidation of voters by employers and landlords. In parliamentary elections voters declared their choices orally, stating how they wished to vote in front of election officials and assembled spectators, so that everyone knew immediately what their choices were. Running tallies of how well candidates were doing provided a live form of race-like entertainment, while also allowing agents to bring up or hold back ‘tallies’ of electors, along with all sorts of other nefarious tactics, such as kidnapping voters.

Other types of election, however, such as those held for town council polls after 1835, simply required the elector to sign and hand in a voting paper. These ballots have a modern appearance but the fact that they still exist, of course, illustrates the key difference with today’s practice: they were not kept secret. In some types of parish election it was even possible for single propertied women to vote, as surviving records of some local polls show. Lists showing the way individuals voted often appeared in local newspapers. They also formed the basis of special pollbooks produced by enterprising local publishers. The fact that these books were sold for a profit illustrates just how much public interest there was in the way people had voted – especially neighbours, relatives, shopkeepers, employees and tenants.

The idea that this system only produced negative results – with tenants being threatened with eviction if they didn’t vote as their landlords directed, or electors selling their votes to the highest bidder – overlooks the many positive features associated with public voting at the time. Chief among these was accountability – the idea that the vote was a public trust or duty that should be exercised ‘in the full glare of publicity’, in order to ensure it was done honestly. As the prime minister Lord Palmerston, expressing the view of most mid-Victorian leaders, explained:

An individual is invested with the power of voting, not for his own personal advantage or interest, but for the interest and advantage of the nation … to be exercised in perfect day, and be open to the criticism of our friends and neighbours and the public at large. (Click here for the full speech)

Most early Victorian MPs agreed. Asked for his views at the 1859 election, for instance, the Berkshire MP Captain Leicester Vernon declared:

Damn the secret ballot … Give me the bold-faced Englishman who, with his hat on one side, swaggers up to the polling booth, and when the clerk says, ‘For whom do you vote?’, answers manfully and IN THE FACE OF HIS NEIGHBOURS.

Openness was considered especially important at a time when only a limited number of people could vote. Rather than being completely excluded from the electoral process, non-electors could see and judge how everyone had polled. As a result, they were often able to play a part in trying to influence how voters behaved. Women, in particular, feature frequently in surviving canvassing books and electioneering papers, with comments like ‘wife says he will vote’ or ‘sister promised’ testifying to their role. As one MP noted during an 1867 Commons debate about giving women the vote, ‘Every one acquainted with elections was aware of the influence which was already exercised by women’. Disraeli, no stranger to electoral shenanigans, noted in his book The Election, ‘If the men have the vote, the women have the influence’.

Women, of course, were not the only type of non-elector. Working men, including all those disfranchised by the new voting restrictions of the 1832 Reform Act, also played a significant role in Victorian elections as non-electors, setting up meetings and pressure groups to influence voters and even threatening to boycott certain shopkeepers or traders, in a practice known as ‘exclusive dealing’. This was not considered as inappropriate or ‘unconstitutional’ as it might seem today. As one MP reminded a crowd of non-electors  during an 1841 campaign:

The vote is public property, the elector is only a trustee, and you the non-electors have the right to scrutinise and to direct the exercise of the voters’ function.

As well as being considered ‘unmanly’, ‘unEnglish’ and unfair on anyone without a vote, secret voting also suffered a series of presentation problems in the early Victorian period. Those most in favour in Parliament – including a significant group of Radical MPs elected after the 1832 Reform Act – found themselves arguing for secrecy in elections, but at the same time pressing for the votes cast by MPs in the Commons to be made more public. The official publication of MPs’ votes from 1836 and calls for greater accountability in public life sat uncomfortably with demands for complete secrecy at the polling booth.

The leadership of the secret ballot campaign in the four decades after 1832 also didn’t help. The cause was first led by the Radical MP George Grote, whose eccentric plans for ‘secret ballot’ voting machines were a gift to satirists. His successor was the unconventional ‘political opportunist’ Francis Berkeley MP, one of three notorious brothers sitting in the Commons renowned for their family feuds, violence and bizarre political behaviour. Motions in support of the secret ballot only ever passed in ‘thin’ Houses, when most MPs were absent, and before 1868 never exceeded the number achieved on 18 June 1839, when 216 MPs voted in its support, but 333 against.

What ultimately led to secret voting being implemented in 1872 was not the success of any popular outdoors campaign in its support. Secret voting never attracted the sort of backing that the anti-corn law movement, for instance, achieved. Instead, for the sake of unity within his Liberal cabinet, Gladstone agreed to carry out a trial of the ballot, on the basis that the 1867 Reform Act, by creating so many more voters, had undermined the idea of voting as a ‘public trust’ exercised on behalf of the unenfranchised. Drawing on experiences of secret voting in Australia and recent London school board elections, the cabinet forced a temporary measure through a very reluctant Parliament. It was only the success of this experiment that eventually led to its permanent adoption.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 14 July 2022, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

The Victorian Commons, as some of our recent articles have shown, was an important testing ground for many of the practices and parliamentary procedures that remain in place today. It also provides early examples of MPs having to grapple with many of the dilemmas that still face our modern representatives. With the two party system becoming far more entrenched and new constituency pressures emerging after 1832, MPs increasingly found themselves having to make difficult choices between conscience and party, or conscience and constituency. Even low-profile backbenchers, who desperately tried to keep out of the spotlight, were unable to escape these uncomfortable ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moments.

One MP who very publicly found himself caught up in a crisis of conscience versus constituency was Henry Charles Sturt (1795-1866). A close friend of the Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel, whom he had fagged for at Harrow, Sturt had been parachuted into the unreformed Commons by his aristocratic family aged just 21 in 1817, sitting for their pocket borough of Bridport. He quit in 1820, to pursue his growing passions for science, archaeology and agriculture, but in 1830 served another short spell as an MP for Dorset.

In 1835 Sturt was re-elected for Dorset as a replacement for William Bankes, who had been implicated in a homosexual scandal. Sturt stood as a supporter of Peel’s short-lived Conservative ministry. More importantly, as a leading member of the county’s agricultural societies and a pioneer of ‘model cottages’ for his tenants, he went to Parliament with the backing of the county’s farmers. He had no problem getting elected again in 1837 and 1841, when he claimed to have ‘been elected by an agricultural constituency on a full understanding that he would support the corn laws’.

This didn’t stop him controversially backing Peel’s modification of the corn laws in 1842, widely seen as a first step towards the removal of the protective tariffs enjoyed by farmers. When Peel proposed to completely repeal the corn laws in 1846, however, Sturt found himself in a quandary. He initially promised ‘to stand by the present protection to agriculture’ and was listed as a firm supporter of the corn laws. Privately convinced by Peel’s arguments in support of free trade, however, he was forced to admit that he had ‘changed his opinion’ and could no longer in conscience support such a law. The Protectionist press demanded that he stand by his constituents and election promises. Finding his position untenable, Sturt resigned.

Accused of lacking the moral courage to stand up to Peel, and of ‘leaving his constituents in the lurch’, Sturt found himself the object of widespread derision. One critic warned him to sell his Dorsetshire estates and flee to France. He even ended up in a popular song about those who remained loyal to their constituents:

The Somerset squires may at Acland throw dirt,

And Dorsetshire farmers may grumble at Sturt,

But I never rat and I ought to be prized,

For a vote, though it’s silent, should ne’er be despised

Later, writing to Peel, who had desperately tried to persuade him not to resign, Sturt offered a mild but ‘telling’ reproach to his leader and friend. ‘My only criticism of your present measure’, he told the prime minister, ‘shall be very gentle – whether it might not have been managed without stranding others and myself’.

To see how to access the full biography of Henry Charles Sturt and other MPs in our 1832-68 project please click here.

PS

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 29 March 2019, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

It may seem surprising to some that popular anti-Catholic sentiment continued to flourish in the decades after Catholic emancipation (1829). But although this major reform ended 151 years of Catholics being formally excluded from the Commons, it was not conceived out of a mood of religious toleration. Instead, it was primarily a tactical response to events in Ireland, where Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association had created an army of Catholic voters willing to do his bidding. By allowing Irish Catholics to sit as MPs, but at the same time severely restricting the number of Irish voters, the Tory government led by the Duke of Wellington aimed to avert civil unrest in Ireland, whilst also dismantling O’Connell’s electoral powerbase.

For many staunch Anglicans the influx of a new breed of Irish Catholic MPs was a high price to pay for silencing O’Connell, who in any case soon began a new campaign for Ireland to leave the Union. For Irish Protestants, in particular, the presence of Irish Catholics was complete anathema, threatening both the position of the Irish Established Church and the ‘Protestant ascendancy’ of the Irish landed ruling elite. Furious clashes between these two groups, over virtually every aspect of Irish policy, helped infuse the Victorian Commons with an almost daily dose of sectarian conflict.

The curious position of English Catholics is often lost sight of in all of this, not least because of the way Irish affairs tended to dominate Victorian attitudes to Catholicism. But in many respects the prospect of English Catholic MPs sitting for English constituencies, at the heart of the Protestant nation, was even more of a threat to the Protestant constitution than Irish Catholic MPs representing predominantly Catholic constituencies. Where would the loyalties of such English Catholics lie, with their constituents or their creed?

These kinds of questions were never far away when Catholics stood for election in England, as some of our recently completed biographies have shown.

In 1832 Thomas Stonor of Stonor Park, whose ancestors were some of Oxfordshire’s most prominent recusants, became one of just five Catholic MPs to be returned for an English constituency at the general election. His election for Oxford was, as one commentator suggested, ‘extraordinary’ given the city’s well-known antipathy to Catholic emancipation. Indeed, historic graffiti against Robert Peel, the Home secretary responsible for passing emancipation, can still be seen in Oxford’s colleges today.

Speaking at his victory dinner, Stonor went out of his way to allay fears that he would ‘confederate with the Irish demagogues in their diabolical endeavours to revolutionize the kingdom’. He also looked forward to proving ‘that a Catholic was not necessarily an enemy to the establishment’. Stonor barely had time to take his seat, however, before he was unseated on petition for corrupt practices that were endemic in the city.

Stonor’s short-lived triumph in 1832 was unusual. The kind of reception more commonly encountered by Catholic candidates was amply demonstrated when he decided to stand for the county in 1837. Placards with ‘Will Oxfordshire add another joint to O’Connell’s tail?’, and ‘No farmers’ friend can vote for Stonor, the Papist’, set the tone for what became a highly charged campaign. After he was defeated at the bottom of the poll, the local Tory paper rejoiced that ‘Protestant feelings are triumphant in this county’.

The additional difficulties faced by English Catholic MPs (as opposed to their Irish counterparts) were perhaps nowhere better illustrated than when a sitting Anglican chose to convert. When John Simeon, Liberal MP for the Isle of Wight, adopted the Roman Catholic faith in 1851, he resigned his seat, believing that he had forfeited the electoral mandate given to him ‘whilst he was a member of the Anglican church’. When Edward Hutchins, Liberal MP for Lymington, refused to do the same after ‘embracing Rome’ five years later, he caused a political scandal. ‘Such conduct is an abuse of the representative principle’ since he ‘is no longer the same man’, protested one local paper. ‘That Mr Hutchins was returned to Parliament by Protestants, will scarcely be denied’, remarked another observer. ‘As a Romanist, then, he is in a false position and it behoves the constituency to call upon the recusant to resign’.

Given these kinds of sentiments in the English constituencies, one of the more surprising features to emerge from our ongoing work on the Victorian Commons is the intellectual attraction that Roman Catholicism was still able to exert over an entire generation of English MPs, many of whom, even if they didn’t convert, clearly came pretty close.

To obtain access to our recent articles, including those referred to above, click here.

PS

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 5 November 2014, written by Dr Philip Salmon.